|
FAREWELL TO AUTHORSHIP
And Why We’re Losing Literature
By Benjamin Hoff
One of the strongest memories of my childhood is that of the
county Bookmobile that would periodically visit the grammar
school I attended in Sylvan, Oregon, then a small, semi-rural
community off a two-lane road leading from Portland to the
coast. When I stepped up into the Bookmobile, I would
encounter first the intriguing smell and then the fascinating
sight of shelf after shelf of books -- colored packages of
adventure that could take me to places I’d never seen, with
people I’d never met. Books probably meant more to me than to
most children, because reading was my way out of a childhood of
illness that kept me in bed, and in pain, a good deal of the
time. My heroes were people who could write -- Mark Twain, Jack
London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Walter Scott -- rather than
actors or athletes.
If someone had told me then that one day I would
write books myself, and that they would be translated into over
twenty languages, communicating to people around the world, I
would have been awestruck at the promise of a dream come true.
I would not have known then what I know now -- that I had been
born too late.
When I tell people that I’ve been having
increasingly severe professional difficulties because of the
multinational corporations that have bought out the
book-publishing industry, they typically respond by advising me
to “hang in there” and “roll with the punches.” They remind me
that I’m an award-wining, internationally bestselling author (as
if I had the luxury of being able to forget the fact). I have
an obligation to the public, they say, to keep writing (ignoring
the reality that it’s one thing to keep writing, but can be
another thing entirely to keep being published). Now that I’ve
decided to leave the book-writing profession and to try writing
stories for magazines and movies, nobody I’ve told of my
decision seems to understand. So the following is my
explanation.
Imagine, whoever reads this, that you are me. Let’s start a
little over twenty-five years ago. You have completed
approximately one-third of the manuscript for a proposed book
you have titled The Tao of Pooh -- a book that is to
humorously explain the generally misunderstood principles of the
generally ignored Chinese philosophy or spiritual teaching known
as Taoism, using the A.A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh
characters. You have submitted the manuscript-so-far and
chapter outlines to Elsevier-Dutton, formerly the independent
publisher E.P. Dutton -- the only American publisher, the editor
who reads your proposal immediately assures you, authorized by
the English corporation The Trustees of the Pooh Properties to
publish any book featuring the Milne characters.
The editor stalls on a decision for months as you
write and mail in chapter after chapter, until the manuscript is
practically complete -- at which point you send a letter stating
that you’re not going to continue until you receive an
acceptance, a contract, and an advance. The publisher then
officially accepts the proposed book and sends you a contract to
sign, which grants you a hardcover royalty of 12 ½% (the
standard is 15%, but you don’t know that). You are to be
“given” (loaned) an advance of $6,000.
The trustees of the Pooh Properties had at first in
their communications with the publisher demanded one-half of
your royalty in exchange for the right to use quotations and
drawings from the Milne Pooh books. But on being told that you
have responded to this demand by refusing to proceed further,
they have reduced their exorbitant permission fee to a
still-enormous 33 1/3% on the hardcover edition and (after the
customary author/publisher splits) 40% on paperback and foreign
editions, if there are any.
After a period of great hesitation, you decide that
you’d rather finish the book than not, despite the considerably
diminished royalty. So you sign the contract.
Months pass. The Tao of Pooh is about to be
printed and released. For what seems a long time, you have been
dealing with a very prickly editor and a very cold-blooded
publishing house. But the book-to-be reads well, and you have
some hope for its success. The editor tells you that he will be
visiting the Dutton West Coast sales representative at his home
in Olympia, Washington -- a two-hour drive from where you’re now
living -- and that he would like to buy you a dinner to celebrate
the upcoming release of your book. He suggests a certain restaurant in
Seattle, a forty-five-minute drive north of Olympia.
You show up at the restaurant carrying a stuffed
bear made by your mother, very closely based on Ernest H.
Shepard’s Pooh drawings. You meet the editor and the sales rep,
and the latter's girlfriend. The editor orders a tray of cheese
blintzes for the table. He tells you that the new foreign
corporate owners are authorizing only $1,275 to advertise the
book, and that Dutton is planning to spend the money on little ads in
The Village Voice. As if to demonstrate that you the
author are not the only one to suffer from the publisher’s
austerity program, he shows you his broken glasses, which he has
taped together as a cheap fix. By now, you are convinced that
the man is not only prickly, he’s crazy.
The sales rep’s girlfriend, who says she is studying
art in college, tells you that she believes it’s good for
artists to starve, because poverty (which she seems to have no
first-hand knowledge of) strengthens character. Having grown up
with professional-artist parents, your viewpoint is somewhat
different; but as the conversation indicates that your viewpoint
is not of interest, you decide not to pursue the subject.
In the meantime, you have noticed a buzzing sound
--
people at nearby tables are discussing the bear, which you’ve
seated on the chair next to yours. You hear the likes of: “Have
you noticed that bear?” “Yes, he looks just like
Winnie-the-Pooh!” “Boy, I really loved those books when I was a
kid.” Your table company ignores the buzzing -- and the two
diners who come over to you and strike up conversations about
the bear.
The editor leans toward you and, as consolation for
the small ad budget, says, “Don’t expect much from this book.
It’s too esoteric to appeal to the general public.”
The editor and his companions excuse themselves,
saying they need to return to Olympia. They pay the check for
the cheese blintzes -- of which you’ve eaten three -- and leave.
You sit there, ravenously hungry, wondering what happened to the
offer of dinner. You think over the money you’ve lost from your
paying work while writing the book, and consider that, according
to the editor’s anti-pep talk, its sales will probably not pay
back your investment. So you decide that you can’t afford to eat
dinner at the restaurant. Bear under arm, you go to your car and
eat the sandwich that you fortunately brought from home,
thinking gloomy thoughts of wasted effort and upcoming failure.
When The Tao of Pooh is released, it is
assassinated in Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews,
and several other publications, including even a
teddy-bear-lover’s gazette, The Teddy Tribune. Unless
you’ve somehow missed something, there are no positive reviews.
Sales figures for the book start low and stay low, ominously so.
When you go to your local library to see if they have ordered a
copy, to be told they haven’t, you catch sight of a photocopy of
the Kirkus Reviews throat-slitter. It has the most
venomous assertions underlined, which you assume is the doing of
the book-buyer. You donate two copies of the allegedly worthless
book.
A “mixed” review
-- part positive, part negative --
appears in The Washington Post. Six years later, you will
learn that it was what saved The Tao of Pooh from almost
certain death. At an American Booksellers Association
convention, a Penguin Books executive will tell you that he came
across the Washington Post review on the Sunday morning
it appeared, while reading the newspaper over breakfast.
Impressed enough by its positive statements to believe that the
unusual book had the potential to reach a large readership, he
directed his staff the next day to make an offer for the
paperback rights. “Dutton didn’t even send the book out for
paperback bids,” he will tell you, still incredulous after six
years. “That shows how much they cared for it. We made an
opening offer -- not much -- and they grabbed it with both hands.”
Just after its release, the paperback edition is
described for about sixty seconds on National Public Radio.
Shortly after that, it appears on the Washington Post
trade paperback bestseller list and then on the New York
Times trade paperback list -- the first time in publishing
history that a book on Taoism had done any such thing. You
learn two valuable lessons: one, every review counts; two, in
the face of bad reviews, even brief national exposure can make a
big difference to the survival of a book.
Although your next two book proposals are rejected
by publishers,
your third one, The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow
-- a biography clearing the reputation of long-maligned 1920s
bestselling author Opal Whiteley -- is accepted and published in
hardcover by independent-minded, author-friendly Ticknor &
Fields. Like its two unsuccessful predecessors, the proposal
had been turned down by a long list of publishers in large part
-- according to statements made in the rejection letters --
because it was not a sequel to The Tao of Pooh, by then a
proven commodity. For it, you receive a $7,500 advance. The
Singing Creek is not a commercial success, but it manages to
win an American Book Award.
By then, Warner Books has bought the paperback
rights -- shortly after which purchase, the two enthusiastic
Warner’s editors responsible for the acquisition quit in disgust
over the new corporate owner’s treatment of staff. No one from
Warner’s shows up at the awards ceremony. But Patti Breitman,
the first of The Singing Creek’s two editors to leave the
house, appears and makes an inspiring speech about the book.
With no one at Warner Books to champion The
Singing Creek, despite increasing sales apparently
stimulated by two National Public Radio programs featuring it,
Warner’s soon decides to drop it. Ticknor & Fields is closed
down by parent company Houghton Mifflin, ending the life of the
hardcover. (A few years later, Penguin Books will buy The
Singing Creek for a $10,000 advance and release it cheaply
and quietly in paperback.)
Ten years after starting The Tao of Pooh, you
work up a partial manuscript plus outline for a companion book,
The Te of Piglet. You submit it to your former editor’s
successor at Dutton -- by then “an imprint of New American
Library, a division of Penguin Books USA, Inc.” -- still the only
American publisher authorized to publish books featuring the
Pooh characters. You’ve worked up the nerve to write the
proposal because your belief in the project outweighs your dread
of Dirty Dutton. At least, it does at first. Then the proposal
is rejected. As the editor’s negative letter sums up:
What I think is wrong here is that we really do want a
sequel to the Tao of Pooh (sic), and we basically
want more of the same. Okay, fine to add in Piglet, fine
to show change from shy and quiet to quiet and strong, but
the book is not going to work if it’s all a showcase for
Piglet. Pooh is still the basic Taoist.
Incensed by the letter -- “They didn’t believe in The Tao of
Pooh, and now they don’t believe in anything else,” you
remark to family and friends -- you decide to burn the
manuscript. You are stopped by your fiancée and a friend who
manages a bookstore. The latter, who’s as contemptuous of
Dutton’s no-Pooh-no-deal attitude as you are, urges you to “go
over that jerk’s head to someone who can see the potential.”
After a long cooling-off period, and after hiring
and firing an agent who without consulting you offers Dutton
world rights to The Te of Piglet for a $50,000 advance --
which Dutton accepts -- you turn negotiations over to your
attorney. The latter, no stranger to tough bargaining, has by
that time obtained for you a $6,000 out-of-court settlement with
Dutton after threatening them with a plagiarism suit over a
Dutton book, edited by The Tao of Pooh’s editor, that
included in its text several word-for-word passages from The
Tao of Pooh without acknowledgement or permission.
As your lawyer describes the Te of Piglet
negotiation process: “At each step of the way, I call up their
attorney, and he yells the terms at me, ‘Take ‘em or leave ‘em.’
I tell him they’re unacceptable, and the only reason he makes
them is because no other American publisher can do the book. He
denies the allegation. He then proceeds to prove it’s true.”
When your attorney asks for a $300,000 advance
-- a
more-than-reasonable figure, considering what The Tao of Pooh
has earned for Penguin -- he encounters a rage so extreme that it
turns comical: “He shouts, ‘Three hundred thousand
dollars! Who does your client think he is -- Garrison
Keillor?’”
You settle for a $150,000 advance and sign the
contract. “Thank God that’s over,” your lawyer declares. “That
attorney was the most obnoxious son-of-a-bitch I’ve ever
encountered.”
(An aside on the traditional publisher’s advance:
Generally speaking, the larger the figure advanced to the
author, the harder the publisher will work to quickly recover
the money -- in other words, the greater the publicity
department’s promotional effort will be. The amount of the
advance depends on how strongly the publisher believes in the
proposal. And that’s where the catch lies. It would seem that
to today’s imagination-challenged corporate decision makers, the
book ideas most deserving of substantial advances are those that
are as old as the hills yet have a contemporary twist. To put it
another way, they combine Historic Precedent with What People
Are Talking About Now. The problem with that somewhat
schizophrenic combination of attributes is that, first, what’s
old-as-the-hills in books is by now quite old indeed; and,
second, what people are talking about when the idea is accepted
is not necessarily what they will be talking about two or three
years after that, when the book is released. So corporate
publishers, who demonstrably know no more about the
characteristics of great writing than most of us know about the
intricacies of rocket science, end up with too many big-advance
disappointments and here-today-gone-tomorrow flash books that
sell impressively the year they’re released but do not sell a
single copy five or ten years later. All of which further
narrows publishers’ sights and makes them less and less likely
to do what the big, wealthy, pre-corporate publishers did so
successfully: back a new voice, an unusual idea, a great piece
of creative writing. Pity the author today who wants to start a
new trend rather than follow existing ones. From the corporate
publisher’s point of view, the trouble with you, the author
Benjamin Hoff, is that your book-proposal ideas have no historic
precedent, and they are not what people are talking about now.
So you will never be given a large advance. But $150,000 will
guarantee you more promotion than will $6,000.)
With The Te of Piglet, you don’t have to
worry about Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews
assassinating the book before it’s had a chance to build sales
momentum. Thanks to the promotional efforts of Dutton’s Head of
Publicity, Lisa Johnson, The Te of Piglet is on every
major bestseller list in the nation before its official
publication date -- the date before which, by professional
agreement, no reviews are to appear. Then the reviews come out,
asserting why the public shouldn’t, and won’t, buy the book.
This time, fortunately and surprisingly, there are some
positive, thoughtful reviews as well.
The Te of Piglet stays on the New York
Times bestseller list in hardcover for 40 weeks. Observing
its performance, book people you know predict confidently that
when the paperback is released, it will be on the bestseller
lists for two-to-three times that length, the usual pattern for
the paperback edition of a solid hardcover bestseller. But
then, instead of assigning paperback promotion to the head of
the paperback publicity department -- standard procedure in
cases of substantial hardcover success -- the publisher for some ungiven reason assigns it to a
young man who seems to be at or near the bottom of the paperback
publicity department hierarchy. The paperback publicity
campaign that follows consists of you phoning in every week to
inform the young man of the book’s position on New York
Times. The Te of Piglet is on that newspaper’s trade
paperback list for 19 weeks -- less than half the length of the
hardcover’s stay. You probably will never learn why Penguin, in
effect, pulled the plug on the paperback publicity campaign.
Four years and a couple of rejected non-Pooh book
proposals later -- after finally realizing that every time you
submit a completely original creation to publishers, it is
turned down -- you begin part-time work on the manuscript for an
all-ages, four-section book you title The House on the Point:
A Tribute to Franklin W. Dixon and the Hardy Boys. It
includes your own Hardy Boys mystery, which you loosely base on
some of the plot of the 1927 factory book The House on the
Cliff, which had been written in three weeks by the
fictitious “Franklin W. Dixon.”
In its introduction touching on your experiences as
an investigative photojournalist and in its concluding essay
proposing the inclusion of observation-and-deduction principles
in education, you make connections between crime detection and
larger social issues. In it, as in The Tao of Pooh, you
attempt to show the potential everyday usefulness of something
long considered specialized knowledge, utilizing children’s-book
characters and a genre long considered mere entertainment, and
making use of a new approach to book writing. The Tao of
Pooh had been a surreal blend of fact and fiction, of
classical Chinese quotations and imaginary conversational
interludes; your Hardy Boys story in The House on the Point
is unusually descriptive -- a fleshed-out, literary version of a
screenplay, a movie on paper.
For the first submission, you send the partial
manuscript to Simon & Schuster, the corporate publisher that by
then had bought the rights to the Hardy Boys characters from the
factory-book syndicate. They reject it, but agree to let you
make use of the characters in exchange for 20% of your royalty.
Four years after starting to write it, you receive a
positive response to the by-then nearly completed manuscript:
St. Martin’s Press, a large corporate publisher, offers a
$10,000 advance, which they agree to raise to $15,000. The
advance figure, as always, is a disappointment; but the
acceptance is a great relief after years of seeing your
manuscripts rejected because they aren’t about Winnie-the-Pooh.
After you sign the contract, the enthusiastic senior
editor who had convinced the publisher’s proposal committee that
the book had commercial potential is fired, and you find
yourself dealing with the publisher of your nightmares, The
Publisher From Hell.
Scrapping their previous verbal agreement to package
The House on the Point as a new work by Benjamin Hoff
rather than as an old work by Franklin W. Dixon, St. Martin’s
declares that they are going to give it a “classic” (imitative)
look. The very idea of the book, they insist, is too
unusual to be commercially successful otherwise.
Despite a contract clause stating that Simon and
Schuster and you are to be consulted regarding the jacket and
frontispiece illustrations, they without any consultation print
the cover illustration from the still-in-print Grossett & Dunlap
1959 revised edition of The House on the Cliff in their
catalog as the jacket illustration for your book. You point out
that it would be illegal and unethical to release The House
on the Point with a stolen illustration on its jacket. So
they switch to an imitation of the plagiarized one, then -- after
you complain -- alter it somewhat. Like the “final” frontispiece
illustration -- clearly a rough sketch, in no way a finished
drawing -- the jacket illustration is faithful to details of the
Franklin W. Dixon story, not yours.
To add to the copycat packaging, The Publisher From
Hell plagiarizes the 1927 Grossett & Dunlap Hardy Boys cover
emblem and the 1959 House on the Cliff’s title page,
typography, and interior layout. You remind them that stealing
is illegal. They grudgingly make some modifications.
St. Martin’s decides to give The House on the
Point an imitation factory-book full cloth cover which, they
admit, is going to raise the purchase price, and imitation
factory-book narrow pages, which are going to increase the page
count, raising the price some more. To show off the cover, they
decide that instead of a jacket they will wrap the book in a
garish red “belly band,” which will need to be folded and
end-glued, and which will necessitate gluing an ISBN sticker to
the back cover -- all of which is going to further raise the
price. Then, to make the book more affordable, they decide to
shorten it by shrinking the type to the next-to-smallest size
available -- thereby jettisoning your idea of an all-ages book --
and decreasing the margins. But in the meantime…
As the printing deadline looms, the replacement
editor hasn’t edited one word of the manuscript. So you edit it
yourself, after which a copy (technical) editor St. Martin’s has
hired from outside the company -- the staff copy editors were
busy -- goes over it to prepare it for typesetting, then sends it
to you, as is customary, for your approval. After you return it,
the publisher comes to editorial life at last and, without
consulting you, makes changes to the text. (You only become
aware of these changes later, by reading the printed book.)
Fed up with the publisher’s arrogance, dishonesty,
and arbitrary actions, sick over the mutilation of your intended
book, and seeing nothing ahead for it but disaster, you request
that the publication rights be returned to you before the
manuscript goes to the printer and binder. St. Martin’s refuses,
saying that they have invested a good deal of money in the book.
They tell you that, according to their attorney, no contract
terms have been violated, so there is no legal basis for your
request.
Taking a cue from the “no legal basis” argument in a
last-minute effort to stop publication, you inform St. Martin’s
Press and Simon & Schuster that you are not going to pay the
permissions fees to copyright holders for the material you have
quoted in the book -- which will make The House on the Point
illegal as soon as the first copy is sold. You haven’t yet paid
the fees. The book is released anyway.
By then, you hope for your reputation’s sake that
the deformed creature will die before many people find out that
it exists. Its absurd packaging feeds that hope, as does the
apparent total lack of promotion. And you are encouraged by the
thought that the reviewers haven’t yet seemed to approve of
anything you’ve written...
The reviewers perform their usual
dishonest tricks.
Publishers Weekly, for one example, decries your
“fulmination on the present state of American society” and your
“diatribe against consumerism [and] uncontrollable contemporary
youth,” the mention of which will presumably turn potential
buyers away, even though these alleged rantings aren’t anywhere
in the book. The Washington Post, for another example,
runs a sarcasm piece, “Say, That’s Swell! A Hardy Boys Update,”
the author of which had admitted while interviewing you by
telephone shortly before the article’s appearance that he hadn’t
actually read your Hardy Boys story.
Knowing what’s wrong with the book better than
anyone else does, you watch with bitter amusement as the critics
miss every one of its glaring faults while criticizing contents
that don’t exist.
By the time The House on the Point has died a
fast, merciful death, its publisher has stopped communicating
with you. Neither St. Martin’s Press nor Simon & Schuster
responds to your telephone calls and letters.
Nearly four years have now passed since the
book’s publication. The House on the Point has long
since been remaindered, as quietly as it had been released. Yet
St. Martin’s, in every detail of their behavior The Publisher
From Hell, hasn’t even performed the customary basic courtesy of
returning your edited manuscript. And they silently refuse to
relinquish the rights to the book. Sick of spending your time,
energy, and money fighting publishers, you haven’t bothered to
ask your attorney to retrieve the rights. What good would it
do? It had been difficult enough before to find a publisher
that liked the manuscript. Who would publish it now?
On several occasions over the years, you’ve asked
the Dutton / Penguin editorial staff if you could be given a
list of publications that have quoted from The Tao of Pooh
and The Te of Piglet. Each time, you’ve been told
that the permissions department says that to compile such a list
would be too much trouble. Finally, last year, after you make
your list-of-publications request to the president of the
company -- who was kind enough not long before to grant your
request to raise the hardcover Tao of Pooh royalty to the
standard percentage -- you receive a thirteen-page Permissions
Report for The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet
for the period of March 21, 1991 -- December 14, 2004, listing
cryptic entries such as:
Contract: 2223 03/21/1991 Kinko’s /
Ref. E4061072 Paid:
09/03/1991
Title: THE TAO OF POOH by Benjamin
Hoff
$168.00 for pp. 115-156
Total contract: $168.00
Contract: 5292 10/17/1991 Advanced
Systems Paid: 11/14/1991
Used in: MAINE EDUCATIONAL ASSESSMENT
TEST, GRADE 8
Title: THE TAO OF POOH by
Benjamin Hoff
$200.00 for pp.
91-94 EDITION: test
Total Contract: $200.00
Contract: 8232 03/11/1995 Champlain
Regional College Paid:
05/15/1992
Title: THE TAO OF POOH by Benjamin
Hoff
$30.00 for 15-page excerpt
Total Contract: $30.00
As you know from your own experience, anyone applying for
permission to quote is required to provide a good deal more
information to the publisher of the work to be quoted than is
stated in the above entries. So you know that the information
you’d like to have is somewhere in Dutton’s records. And you
know that you’re not going to be given it.
You continue to see listed on nearly every hardcover
royalty statement for The Tao of Pooh or The Te of
Piglet the tantalizing, mysterious names of individuals and
organizations granted permission to quote from those books -- the
names and the amounts of payment. You will probably never know
what any of the quoting publications are, and so will probably
never be able to find and read them -- and will therefore
probably never see any of that apparently substantial body of
evidence verifying that what you wrote had an effect on this
world.
Another request you’ve made several times over the
years with no noticeable result is for Dutton and Penguin to
forward reader letters to you in a timely manner. You have
received letters months or even years after they were mailed to
the publisher. Some of these letters contained invitations to
speak at banquets, grand openings, and other events. Most
arrived in your mail after the events had taken place.
The message behind the denial of these requests, as
well as the other demeaning treatment you’ve received from
publishers, is: You’re not worth much. The trouble with
being given this message repeatedly for such a long time is that
you’ve come to believe it. Like most authors you know -- the
good ones, anyway -- you’re your own harshest critic, on the
constant lookout for the slightest flaw in your writing. That’s
why you’re a good self-editor, if nothing else. But it’s also
why you’re inclined to believe negative professional assessments
of your work, your abilities, and yourself. Over
the years, you’ve pushed every bit of professional criticism and
rejection deep down inside and kept writing, to fulfill a dream
that cannot be fulfilled because others have made it
impossible. And you’ve paid the price.
You have been treated by two psychotherapists for
clinical depression and grief caused by publishers’
mean-spirited, belittling treatment of yourself and your work.
You have been given dental care for problems resulting from jaw
clenching at night, which began as you watched your last book
being butchered -- you cracked two back teeth and displaced two
very visible front ones.
So, reader of this essay,
are you tired of being me,
the author? If so, maybe you can imagine how tired I
am. If you were to dedicate your time and energy to writing,
wouldn’t you prefer to write something you could feel good
about? That’s what I’m going to allow myself to do from now on
-- to get completely away from book publishers and write for
magazines and movies. If neither of those two areas wants my
efforts, I’m going to forget about putting words on paper and
possibly turn to the music career I once decided against. It’s
much healthier, I’ve concluded, to let a dream die than to allow
it to destroy yourself.
A couple of years ago, the National Endowment for the Arts
released a report indicating that between 1992 and 2002, the
number of non-bookreading American adults increased by 17
million. The report speculated that the most likely reason
for this great turning away from books was competition from
television, movies, and the internet.
Because of what I’ve seen, heard, and experienced in
a quarter-century of authorship and more than half a century of
readership, I believe that the growing disinterest in books is
instead largely due to the relentless shrinking of literary
variety and degradation of literary quality brought about by the
destruction of the independent book-publishing industry.
Although I’ve been an avid reader for most of my life and own
over 4,000 books, I too find less and less to interest me in
bookstores as time goes by. And I don’t watch television shows
or today’s movies (because of their mediocre ideas and writing,
their rotten
taste, and their unprofessional lack of respect for the audience), and
I don’t own a computer.
For years, I dealt as well as I knew how with
publishers who seemed dedicated to opposing at every step the
new ideas and forms of writing I was trying to bring to the
literary world. From successfully fighting a regressive, racist
jacket illustration for The Tao of Pooh to unsuccessfully
fighting the wrecking of The House on the Point, I
participated in what seemed the writing-profession equivalent of
a martial arts movie.
Before the corporate era, I’ve been told by veteran
authors, the business of writing books wasn’t like that. But
over the past forty years, authors have become increasingly
caught in the crossfire as the once-gentlemanly American
book-publishing arena has been transformed into an international
war zone. Victims of corporate conquest, our once-great
publishers have been reduced to mere false-front divisions of
the now six surviving major publishing houses, which themselves
survive not as autonomous companies but only as divisions of
their parent mega-corporations (see the list following the
essay), only two of which are American.
It shouldn’t be surprising that the public has
little awareness of the severity of the situation, considering
the news blackout that the American media seem to be operating
under in this vital area of influence. As an example of how
unwilling the media are to show today’s corporate book
publishers in their true light: I sent a short, simplified,
no-names version of this essay to a substantial number of
American magazines, from The Atlantic Monthly to
Mother Jones, as well as to a variety of American
newspapers, from The Seattle Times to The New York
Times. All of these publications indicated in one way or
another that they did not wish to print it.
Not even the book-writing magazines or workshops
I’ve encountered have seemed to want to tell anyone what’s going
on out there. When I read or listen to their “You Can Be A
Published Author” hyperbole, I think they must be living in a
time prior to May, 1966, when RCA bought Random House, starting
the corporate race to buy the wealthiest, most successful
publishers and gut them.
The truth is:
All the great publishers are
gone;
only their names remain. Don’t be fooled by the presence of
those names on today’s books and corporate bragging lists -- they
are names of the dead. The spirit of independent enterprise
that once animated those names -- the spirit that joined
creativity, communication, and commerce to form the great
publishing houses -- is no more. And America is much the worse
for its loss.
From the beginning of our nation, which started
with the Revolution-inspiring pamphlets of Tom Paine and the
Constitution-shaping words of Thomas Jefferson, our society has
been guided by writers who could articulate new principles and
better ways of life. Over time, books have proven to be the
most influential “packages” of that writing. We have developed
our personal and national ideals, better understood our past,
and shaped and reshaped our present largely because of the
influence of a great variety of thought-provoking books. But
now…
The variety is constantly diminishing as corporate
committees of book-ignorant, conservative-minded decision makers
reject ideas and rework manuscripts they consider too new and
untried, not in harmony with a particular point of view or
political ideology, or lacking the potential to quickly and
sensationally bring them large amounts of risk-free money.
Literary quality and intelligence are being lost as well in the
relentless corporate dumbing down of literature and numbing down
of readers. And authors.
How many wise, inspiring, entertaining, or even
basically well-written books can possibly be produced by an
industry that treats authors like dirt on the corporate floor?
Literary creativity and professional integrity cannot survive in
such a deadly atmosphere.
At least, mine couldn’t.
|